The Australian government has revealed that the "eerie green glow" emitted by many medal winning athletes at the Sydney 2000 games is the result of a secret ingredient in the medals.


"When we say gold medals, we are of course referring to the colour," a SOCG spokesman said today. "The medals do contain a small proportion of gold, but largely they're made of 100% Australian produced weapons grade plutonium."

"We haven't had a decent gold rush since the 19th century, and given the current state of the Aussie dollar, we were a bit nervous about just giving the stuff away," said Federal Resources Minister Sen. Nick Minchin. "But there's tonnes of uranium lying around, and nothing's more Ozzie than our plutonium medals, which begin their life as uranium dredged out of Kakadu national park, and are then processed in a world class ozzie reactor."

The revelation has solved the mystery of unidentified radar blips on the worlds defence systems that seemed to be eminating from the Homebush Bay area. At one point the NORAD facility in the United States had moved to "Defcon Yellow" when it was thought that the blips were alien life forms trying to get into the Olympic stadium for free.

The radar contacts are in fact the Australian swimming team, who according to a SOCOG spokesman "should be glowing like a giant lava lamp by now."

Attention is now focussed on a debate over whether the extra dose of plutonium received from a gold medal hung around the neck constitutes cheating. Plutonium is not detected in any of the standard doping tests used by SOCOG, but critics claim that a healthy dose of radiation can clearly improve an athletes performance.

"Just look at the Incredible Hulk," said an official from the Bulgarian weightlifting team. "One minute he's a ninety pound weakling, but give him a few gamma rays and he can lift the Olympic cauldron with one hand!"

Australia's Olympic medal swimming hero, Ian Thorpe, was unavailable for comment. Thorpe, who left his last media conference hurriedly after turning green and bursting out of his clothes, was last seen heading in the direction of Lucas Heights with a struggling Jelena Dokic clutched under one arm.

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